Reviews

Dining With Alice

Bring together the magic and
mayhem of Alice in Wonderland, the culinary wizardry of food
designers Bompass and Parr and a cast of over 50 professional and community
performers, and place it all in the beautiful gardens of a moated 15th-century
manor house and you should have the recipe for an astonishing theatre
experience. Regrettably, however, the idea behind Dining With
Alice
, an immersive show taking place at Elsing Hall as part of the
Norfolk and Norwich Festival this week, is far more impressive than its
execution.

Bompass and Parr’s
Victorian-inspired banquet, the first course of which is eaten at one table,
the next course at another, and so on, with the audience constantly moved through the gardens, is inventive, playful and delicious. At one stage
in the meal audience members are seated to dine on their own, which although
unnerving at first, has the very clever effect of focusing one’s attention on
the intricacies of the table setting, John Del’ Nero’s brilliant soundscape and
the little snippets of theatre happening around the place.

As a taster of the experience to
come, this works very well, raising expectations and putting audience members
in the right frame of mind to respond to interactive drama. But although the
meal continues and the atmosphere in the gardens becomes increasingly magical
as night falls, the theatre element of Dining With Alice
hits a dead end.

Director Hilary Westlake’s cast
of flamboyant Lewis Carroll characters look the part, but there are too few of
them for this to feel like immersive theatre proper. Each table gets just a
couple of moments of Alice-related dialogue during the evening, not enough to
ever get a sense of character from actors who for the most part appear
unwilling (or unable) to really engage with audience members. The large team of community actors
playing waiters do their best to create the appropriate atmosphere, but have
not been directed enough to help the drama along.

The final part of the show, a
sort of variety performance and sing-a-long from the cast, with the entire
audience brought together in one place for the first time since the start of
the evening, makes for an unsatisfying end to things. With so little invested
in the characters, the audience is easily distracted from the underwhelming,
lazily directed performances and the show ends with a whimper rather than a
bang.

All in all, an opportunity wasted, and along with
it a great deal of public money. What a shame.